ProGuide: Is Your Business Social Media Savvy?

Social networking sites have become the biggest tool in a small to medium sized business’ arsenal and by simply being social, the same companies can unlock business growth and market their products and services at very little cost. These days, capitalizing on your corporate social media presence is integral to a company’s survival. In fact, it’s strange to think that just a few tweets and “likes” could turn into pure profit.

social media
Photo Credit: photo by Richard Goodwin

While you may have a personal love of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram, translating this to your business is not always easy. Wake up to the power of social media, be it by going out to get Tiktok likes and promoting your commercial interests to bag those all-important clients and customers with our guide to becoming a socially savvy business.

Know your target market

As with any marketing strategy, you must have a strong sense of who your customer is to reap any kind of reward on the social scene. Crafting a social media marketing campaign that is customer focused is essential and getting to know everything there is to know about your target market is at the core of this. Before signing up to your social media favorites, detail where your customers live, what lifestyle they lead and what their hobbies and interests may be. If your company is built on a business to business model research both the professional and personal side of potential clients.

Knowing the age range of your target audience is also important. For example, if you’re aiming towards a younger or teenage audience, you’re best promoting on an application like TikTok that has predominantly young viewers. You may find it difficult to grow on TikTok initially with the huge success that it currently has but with a few tips and tricks, like how to get views likes and followers through purchases, you’ll soon attract the audience you aimed for.

On the other hand, on the customers’ side, for those looking to market a retail product that focuses on beauty industries might consider focusing on Instagram. Many look to buy Instagram followers to help boost their market focus on sites like Instagram to better connect with audiences that would be interested in their product.

Getting to know your target market will not only help you define what content you should share socially and who you should connect with, but also what social networking sites will be the most effective in your quest for social media success.

Make sales and development the bottom line

When it comes to promoting your products or services to your followers and fans, discretion is the key to enticing customers to your website and keeping them engaged. Striking the right balance between blatant promotion and maintaining social profiles that users really invest in is the ultimate challenge and many businesses get this very (very) wrong, which evidently leads to a loss of followers and a lack of engagement. However, whilst discretion should be exercised, you must always remember that the sales and development of your business should be the main focus of any social media marketing campaign.

Ask yourself, will your strategy drive traffic to your website or boost footfall to your stores? If the answer is no, then it may be time to revise your campaigns to ensure tangible results for your business.

Track your success

An integral part of any marketing or PR campaign is to track exactly what impact your current strategy is having on traffic and sales, and using this same information to evolve future campaigns for maximum impact. Whilst the majority of profiles give you basic details on how many fans and followers you have, looking beyond this into more sophisticated metrics is the key to successfully tracking your progress.

Use each social media channel’s built-in tools, Google Analytics and free online tools like Bitly to understand more about how your business is being branded across all your social profiles and use this to fuel your next campaign, boost engagement and gain a greater understanding of your social media savvy customers.

For example, on YouTube you can check the number of subscribers you have, as well as demographic, views and likes. It can be a little disheartening to see numbers low or falling, but there are ways to overcome this, such as purchasing subscribers, as detailed on Tinkapp.com.

About the Author

The author of this post is Tony Earnshaw, an entrepreneur who established UK Commercial Cleaning in 2007. Since then the company has evolved from a small cleaning firm into a national organisation and is now the UK’s foremost commercial cleaning contractor.